Relatives say Cleveland suspect had violent streak

Culema Nevarez adds balloons to a growing tribute outside the hole of Gina DeJesus in Cleveland Friday, May 10, 2013. DeJesus was freed Monday from the home of Ariel Castro where she and two other women had been held captive for nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)

This image provided by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's office shows the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center booking photo of Ariel Castro, 52, after he was ordered to be held on $8 million bail Thursday, May 9, 2013, in Cleveland. Castro, a former school bus driver, is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a decade in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Cuyahoga County)

The mannequin was life-sized, with a mop-like wig and creepy, slanted eyes. Ariel Castro kept it propped against a wall of his house and liked to use it to scare people. Sometimes he drove around town with it in the backseat of his car.

“He threatened me lots of times with it,” said Castro’s nephew, 26-year-old Angel Caraballo, who was terrified of his uncle as a little boy and unnerved by him as an adult. “He would say: ‘Act up again, you’ll be in that back room with the mannequin.’ ”

Castro installed padlocks on every door leading into his dilapidated home on Seymour Avenue. He kept the basement bolted shut, too. When relatives showed up at his front door, he made them wait for a half-hour before emerging, and nobody was allowed past the living room.

“He had told me to stay in the kitchen,” said Elida Marie Caraballo, Castro’s niece, who was at his house about seven years ago with Castro’s daughter, Rosie. “I didn’t know why.”

In the days since Castro’s arrest on charges of keeping three women imprisoned in his home for a decade, relatives and acquaintances have sketched a portrait of him as a man with a twisted sense of humor, a compulsion for secrecy and a towering, terrifying rage that led him to savagely beat, torment and control his common-law wife, Grimilda Figueroa. He was a “monster,” they said.

The image stands starkly at odds with the picture drawn by some neighbors, fellow musicians and others. They described the former school bus driver as an affable guy who played bass in a merengue band and rode motorcycles around town.

“You can talk to him and you think he’s a nice guy,” said Frank Caraballo, Castro’s brother-in-law. “I think it was a female thing. He was really controlling with females. You know, he didn’t want no one to touch his daughters. He wanted to know everything his wife did.”

Figueroa left Castro years ago and died last year after a long illness. During their early years together, Castro worked in a plastics factory and treated his wife well, relatives said. But after their first child was born, they said, something snapped in him.

He beat Figueroa relentlessly, her relatives said. They said he pushed her down the stairs, fractured her ribs, broke her nose several times, cracked a tooth and dislocated both shoulders. Once, he shoved Figueroa into a cardboard box and closed the flaps over her head, they said.

Figueroa filed domestic violence complaints accusing Castro of threatening many times to kill her and her daughters. She charged that he frequently abducted the children and kept them from her, even though she had full custody with no visitation rights for Castro.

He kept his wife and children imprisoned, cut off from friends and family, according to relatives. Figueroa couldn’t even unlock her own front door, they said.

“When I go over there to visit her, and I ask her, ‘Nilda, I’m here, open the door,’ she’s like, ‘I can’t. Ariel has the key,’ ” Elida Caraballo recalled.

Castro forbade Figueroa to use the telephone, relatives said. After warning her not to leave, he would test her to see if she obeyed.

Once, Figueroa was returning home with her arms full of groceries when Castro jumped into the doorway with the mannequin, frightening her so badly that she fell backward and smashed her head on the pavement, Caraballo said.

Castro was strange in other ways, relatives said. He would take his nephew and nieces to fast-food restaurants and make them split a fountain soda, forcing them to pass the drink around. He would let each one sip just enough until the line of soda reached an exact marking on the paper cup.

Then he would tear a hamburger into four pieces and watch them eat it, said Angel Caraballo.